kissbalint-en

I research the sounds of rainfall and wind, thermal fluctuations and water bodies, i.e. geophony. This is, for example, the sound of rain tapping on your windowsills, the wind whistling through electric wires and trees, or the sounds of rivers.

My observation is that these sounds do not receive any attention in the building and development of the urban fabric and thus cities are neglecting a significant part of their sonic aesthetics.

My research seeks to lay the foundations for geosonification — a conscious urban design and architectural practice focusing on the fine-tuned acoustic expression of geophysical processes.

I believe that rain, wind, and temperature changes are phenomena that, with proper planning, can make our urban soundscapes way more diverse and sonically pleasing.

Acoustic communication design

In addition to my scholarly career I work as a sound designer, more precisely as an acoustic communication designer. You can find my works below.

I do sound design for short films, podcasts, apps; I create sound logos and other audio content for installative, performative and fixed media. Feel free to reach out!

Contact

+358 46 626 0789
balint@blautumn.hu
ig: kissbelint

00530 Helsinki

Rain, contrary to former beliefs, has structure — it’s not a completely random process. Drops are organised into microstructures and drop size distribution (DSD) shows autocorrelatedness.

In these etudes you hear three percussioninsts interpreting rainfall patterns. The patterns used for these pieces are software-generated (using Max and SuperCollider). They follow a doubly stochastic (Cox) distribution and are in line with the current statistical understanding of rainfall microstructure.

The etudes are seeking an answer for the question 'how do we musically re-tell the abstract patterns of precipitation?' Referring to the concept I named the pieces "Run-off" which is the path the water takes after reaching the ground.

A keynote of these pieces was to invite the audience to listen to rain outside the concert hall.

I.

The first, medium-yield rainfall event happens in an urban setting where the built structures introduce an intermittent texture.

II.

The second rainfall event is a heavy but stongly patchy downpour.

III.

The third rainfall event is a drizzle with small drops and low water yield.

Metamorphosis

A four-hour long field recording of Lake Balaton freezing at -12°C, told in 60 seconds.

The recordings I used for this composition were made in January 2022. I spent a week at Lake Balaton to explore the seasonal geophony. On Monday 24th, I arrived on the spot (Szigliget Bay) at 8pm and by 12pm the bay was covered with solid ice. In the end, I threw a pebble on the frozen surface to test it.

The water was gurgling in the beginning, the thin ice was hissing, stretching, crunching, and then suddenly, complete silence. The lake underwent a complete sonic metamorphosis in roughly four hours that I could perfectly monitor acoustically in the complete darkness.

Metamorphosis

Aalto Day One 2023

The opening ceremony of the academic year 2023/24 at Aalto University featured my soundscape composition about the campus. Instead of using visual material, Aalto decided to present its sonic profile to the audience.
It was a remarkably exciting challenge to find ways in which a soundscape composition can meet branding objectives.

You can listen to the undistorted audio from the player above and see the recording of the event in the embedded video where we share some information about the piece with my colleague Jessy Muyonjo who created the visualisation.

Wihuri international prizes

I worked for Finnish cultural foundation Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation on the sound of two portait films about their prize winners in 2023. It was an honor to compose for and post-produce a film featuring Tristan Murail, a hihgly influential composer of 20th century spectral music.

The films were produced for an intra-event screening at Wihuri Foundation's Award & Grant Gala held in Musiikkitalo in 9.10.2023.

Artlife podcast

TOKYO organisation's podcast about designers and creative professionals sharing their experiences and stories from their life and career. I did a full-stack production for Artlife (recording, editing, sound designing, mixing, and mastering). You can access all the episodes by clicking here.

The production of this podcast (9 episodes) was not only a great sound design and audio production task — I have had wonderful conversations with remarkable figures of global art and design scene from Finland.

Hangkert collective

We have been advocates of clairaudience and acoustic awareness at our Budapest-based art collective, Hangkert. One of our main drives is getting to know our city in detail in its aural dimensions.

We have been making podcasts about different topics related to soundscapes and sound studies. I created the sound design for the episodes.

hangkert podcast · Hangkert Podcast No. 1 - Budapest mint hangtáj

We have organised two public workshops in Tolnai Lajos street that attracted people from different social backgrounds and with various interests. The program included soundwalking, recording audio, roundtable discussions, listening to multichannel sound art and doing an improvised concert.

Hallójárat

I have produced the first three episodes of a radio program, Hallójárat, with my colleague & co-listener Réka Farkas-Kovách about topics on urban soundscape and sonic urbanism. The program is on the waiting list of Tilos radio's programs.

Planned start: Autumn 2024.

Contrasting the Schaferian tradition, we follow the sonic philosophy of Stephanie Loveless and Salomé Voegelin when introducing the fundamental notions within acoustic ecology and soundscape studies.

Download and read the program here.

A Taxonomy of Rain Sounds

I had the opportunity to work with Barry Truax, a key figure of acoustic ecology, on my master's thesis in which I created a system for categorising the sounds of urban rainfall events. In the thesis I studied hydrology, urban cover types, the texture and timbre (perceptual aspects of) rain. The proof-of-concept work projected 256 urban "rain sound instances" through six hierarchical layers.

In this work I addressed multiple different aspects of rainfall after which I designed a timbre scaling questionnaire (see some of the results below) through which I aimed to map the perception of rain sounds on typical urban cover types. The questionnaire was anonymous.

I.

Sound of light rain hitting dead leaves.

II.

Sound of heavy rain hitting a metal roof.

III.

Sound of moderate rain hitting muddy soil.

IV.

Sound of moderate rain hitting a metal windowsill.

V.

Sound of moderate rain hitting a plastic roof element.

VI.

Sound of heavy rain hitting concrete.

Qubit: Városi Szövettan

I have been invited to Qubit’s Városi Szövettan podcast with fellow members of Hangkert. We had a conversation about urban soundscapes with urbanist Édes Balázs.

Teaching “Hangkert podcast” course

I have worked with five Media Design students of MOME on the production of a podcast episode in the framework of a BA-level course. During the course we explored the blurred boundary between natural and artificial sounds; we recorded, edited, and published the episode.

hangkert podcast · Hangkert podcast no. 3 - Természetesen

Hiss

An 8-channel soundscape composition about my favourite industrial soundscape in Budapest: Nyugati Railway station. Electromechanical sounds, PA in different languages, and a hidden spot with a clean echo. You can download the files here.

Traces

An 8-channel etude on the electromagnetic soundscape of Kőszeg. I explored the town with a pair of electromagnetic capsules as part of iASK's 2021 workshop.

Listen to the stereo mixdown at the embedded player or download the tracks of the multichannel version from here.

Traces

In the untraceable signal sources I found inharmonic, bell-like sonic content. This was particularly exciting in the context of the history of the bells in Kőszeg — after the world wars, the bells were re-cast and as a consequence the original chord of the bells was dismantled.

Studie T.Y.K.

In this suite I have experimented with deep learning and code-based music composition techniques.

You can also listen to this material on Spotify or on Apple Music.

I.

The first etude, Látens tér, explores certain points of a latent space created through 12 stages of unsupervised deep learning of audio with GanSynth. The data set that the model was trained on is a comprehensive collection of my audio works. I was interested to hear if there are global features that characterise my sound design practice that can be acquired by an AI model. Although the timbres showed some coherence with each other, no clearly recognisable features were extracted.

II.

The second etude, Wh-questions(ai), was created using SuperCollider. I organised basic sound events (sine waves, impulses, and segments of white noise) into a pattern which I then fed into an AI model trained on a speech corpus. The model struggles to assign the proper speech sounds to the input and is pushed to use glitchy vocal expression (vocal fries, sighs, etc.). I experimented with convolution reverbs of bathrooms to accentuate this horrific character.

Hővíz

Soundscape composition of the Tapolca stream.

In the piece, I explore the sonic metamorphosis of the warm, clear karst water as it flows from the cave under Tapolca town, finds its way through the reeds and mixes up with Lake Balaton.

Hővíz

MOMO

A set of compositions for Zsófia Nemes’s Időlovag, a contemporary dance project inspired by Michael Ende's novel Momo. It premiered in May 2021 in Budapest in the National Dance Theatre's large hall.

juli x blautumn

In this electronica / drum and bass music duo, we are exploring human behaviour and emotional states being analogous to natural phenomena with special focus on season changes.